Whoo. Time feels short. I'm trying to type as much dissertation as I can before almost literally dropping off the face of the earth tomorrow, as rehearsals begin in Cardigan Bay for some Shakespeare we're doing. Don't expect updates any time soon! And, it goes without saying, everyone's welcome to come along to the performance, but don't expect to be able to use electricity, trains, or piped water.

Tags: stdogmaels, abbey, shakespeare

Labels: music, university

This has been going on for some time now, and to my shame I haven't posted about it yet. Norman Geras has been doing a great job of covering developments. I have nothing to add to what he has said; the purpose of this post is just to draw the attention of anyone who is unaware of it to the fact that there is effectively a completely unjustified boycott of Israeli academics currently in place thanks to an idiotic vote by the new University and College Union. One would hope that this doesn't need saying, but such a measure is completely contrary to all notions of academic integrity and freedom, and I urge you to join the petition against it over at SPME.

Tags: israeli, boycott, academic.

Labels: politics, university

It's nearly August again, so time for some advertising! It's along the same lines as last year's concert, which was a great success. It would be lovely to see you there!

More information here.

Tags: bishops, consort, southwell, bishopsconsort, minster, southwellminster, concert, whatsweetermusic, rutter, music, choral, english

Labels: bishopsconsort, music

Went to Choral Evening Prayer at the Metropolitan Cathedral last Friday and I was very impressed. I've been to services there before, but this was my first in the body of the church. The acoustic is deliciously wet (about eight seconds) and the voicing of the organ really soaks into it. I also enjoyed the rough-at-the-edges quality of the choral singing — it made the music feel really alive.

Tags: liverpool, metropolitan, cathedral, catholic, church, choir, organ.

Labels: liverpool, music, photography

We fixed the washing machine again yesterday (yes, ourselves!), this time extending our expertise to fitting new pulleys, washers and bolts. Now it works as good as new... and doesn't make that awful rattling sound when it's on spin! I'm now running round the house trying to do all the washing and get packed to go to Leicester tonight, from whence we will wend our way to Merseyside on Saturday night, following an improvisation masterclass with David Briggs, which should feed into my dissertation a bit too. It feels like there's no time... I guarantee this will be an exceptionally stressful summer.

Last night I went to my first ever blog meetup thanks to Richard Fair and the people at the BBC Manchester Blog. We went to the Pavilion (big tent) at the Manchester International Festival, a fortnight of cultural type stuff happening in the city this year. It was great fun to meet up with fellow bloggers, although a shame I had to disappear early!

I managed to take a few snaps, but you're probably best looking at other people's, since many had cameras with very long bits which looked like they cost lots of money. Although I did manage to get a new angle on the Beetham Tower by walking the back way from the G-Mex Metro stop:

Tags: bbcmanchesterblog, blog, manchester.

Labels: blogging, manchester

Yesterday was one of the rare occasions when I checked the Telegraph website — an event that usually happens when I want to reassure myself that I am not conservative and/or that not every news site carries the same recycled Associated Press/Reuters stories. So anyway, while I was there, I stumbled across this opinion piece by Charles Moore (a former editor of the paper), entitled "Flying the flag is only the first step to victory". Moore's article is problematic, in my view, first for its blend of half-truth and prejudice, but chiefly for its completely facile and functionalist view of Christian symbols.

Moore is responding to Gordon Brown's instruction that all government buildings fly the Union flag. Attentive readers will recall that Robert Putnam spoke about the logic of the American obsession with their flag a couple of weeks ago in Manchester. Even more attentive readers will also recall that Putnam argued that Americans' "flag worship" was a means of creating a solidifying "civic nationalism" out of the dangerous shards of an "ethnic nationalism", which could not deal with the pressures of immigration. To this extent, then, I sympathise with Brown and Moore in arguing for such a unifying realm of public symbolism in Britain. But after this, Moore really starts going off on one:

[...] millions whose first language is not English now live in this country. A significant minority of them cannot even speak English.

Many of these people are Muslims, and some seem to hate the country they inhabit. Their most prominent leaders, including the Muslim Council of Britain, which claims to be their main umbrella organisation, equivocate about the requirements of being British. You cannot, for example, get them to say that it is wrong to kidnap or kill British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

What exactly is Moore saying here? That to qualify as "British", you have to agree with an authorised (ie, Telegraph-led) version of what "Britishness" is? And as for getting "them" to say that killing British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are surely a large number of "white" left-wingers (ie, not "them") who would say the same thing. Are they therefore also not British? The logic in Moore's argument is, quite simply, missing. But, wait! It gets worse:

So it is natural to ask oneself more sharply what it is to be British, and to realise that the idea has been slipping away. There is nothing like threat to make people think harder about who they are. Renewed interest in the Union flag is a symptom of this. A piece of cloth composed of variations of the most famous Christian symbol re-acquires meaning.

Whither the Union flag? What "meaning" does it reacquire? Moore does not ask or answer this question, completely undermining any credibility that arguing for its deployment could have. What's worse (and perhaps symptomatic of this aversion to "meaning"), Moore goes on:

She [Linda Colley, in her book on British nationalism] does not argue that this [public ownership of nationalism symbolism] was automatically a good thing - the Britishness she describes was often aggressive, violent, greedy and opportunistic - but, politically, it worked.

Great. So as long as politics "works" — even if it is "aggressive, violent, greedy and opportunistic" — it's OK. Sorry, what was his problem with suicide bombing again? I'll be charitable for a moment, though. Moore does make one salient point:

Values don't hover above the British Isles like this summer's rainclouds. They arise out of the choices made about who runs things and how they are run. You find them in a Church, or an army, or a police force, or a profession, or a legislature, or a school, or a family. In other words, you find them in institutions. And it is free institutions that modern politicians are so bad at understanding.

Here, Moore is right. Governments are bad at understanding what William Temple called "intermediate institutions" — those organisations which operate within civil society to mediate between the state and private enterprise. I'm not so sure that governments need to "understand" them, though — if people are doing and acting as they should — with their communities in mind — these institutions should thrive withal. Governments "understanding" usually leads to governments "interfering".

If only Moore had thought a little bit more about his latter point, he could have made a convincing argument. But as it stands, his article happily refers to "Christian symbols" without any inquiry into their proper context — that is, Church communities, wider communities, "the Christian narrative", and scripture more generally. Taking "the cross" in such a facile way to demonstrate "British" superiority over against those nasty "Muslims" is cringeworthy and reminiscent of the Crusades, when much the same thing happened. It encourages people in their conviction that to be "Christian" you just have to be British and wave the flag around, and does not present them with anything of monotheism's inherent risk.

It is only through being in-community that Christian symbols — which stand as symbols of naked violence when held up by crude, narrow-minded nationalists — become softened and enmeshed in the fuzzy relationships and challenges of actually living with others of different opinions and backgrounds. Thus they acquire true, practised meaning. Such a simplistic appraisal of "Britishness" is only possible for Moore because he does not understand, and does not wish to know, that religion can only ever happen in community, and it is the same alienation from community which drives both Muslims to suicide bombing and Christians to reading the Daily Telegraph.

Perhaps, though, this is as much as we should expect from an ex-editor of a paper whose darling is Margaret "no such thing as society" Thatcher. I sense the acrid stench of conservative hypocrisy.

Tags: christianity, islam, charlesmoore, muslim, moore, charles, telegraph, community, dailytelegraph, church.

Labels: church, politics

The nature and style of sociology has been attuned to the selfsame modern society it theorized and investigated; sociology has been engaged since its birth in a mimetic relationship with its object — or, rather with the imagery of that object which it constructed and accepted as the frame from its own discourse. And so sociology promoted, as its own criteria of propriety, the same principles of rational action it visualized as constitutive of its object. It also promoted, as binding rules of own discourse, the inadmissibility of ethical problematics in any other form but that of communally-sustained ideology and thus heterogenous to sociological (scientific, rational) discourse. Phrases like "the sanctity of human life" or "moral duty" sound as alien in a sociology seminar as they do in the smoke-free, sanitized rooms of a bureaucratic office.

—Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust Polity/Blackwell 1991, p. 29

Tags: bauman, modernity, zygmunt, holocaust, judaism, jude, morality, sociology.

Labels: politics, quotations, university

Jonny Billericay gives his inimitable take on the smoking ban from a rain-soaked pub in Norfolk.

Tags: jonnybillericay, norfolk, ban, smoking.

Labels: humour, politics

I have just been to a very pleasant Independence Day party at my friend's very pleasant flat in the Northern Quarter. However, the reason for this post is to fulfill my need to record the fact that, as we were leaving, her friend called me a "man-sized man". As I have never been called this before, and certainly never will be again, it was important to ensure that the event did not dissolve into the stew on the slow cooker of long-term memory.

Labels: humour, manchester

Following up to my post on the rights and wrongs of the smoking ban, here's a story from the BBC News website about the Revd Anthony Carr, who, making much the same points, lit up his pipe in a police station in protest.

Tags: vicar, smoking, ban.

Labels: politics

Mainly informed by the excellent Snooker Scene blog, I've learnt of a number of stupid administrative decisions that have surfaced at the start of this season. First there was 15-year-old Michael White being denied the right to take up his professional card due to his age, in spite of 2005 world champion Shaun Murphy being allowed to do so at that same age. Then there was a clutch of visa problems which prevented several players from the Far East being able to make their qualifying matches in Wales last week. (Qualifying matches, incidentally, for the Shanghai Open!)

But now, the Edinburgh Evening News runs the story that Chris Small, who was forced to retire from the game two years ago due to a degenerative spinal condition, has received no money from the sport's benevolent fund, while Alex Higgins has apparently received £20,000 to have his teeth sorted. Moreover, Higgins has a number of outstanding disciplinary matters against his name and had every opportunity in his snooker career, while Small's spotless career was cut short by circumstances beyond his control.

Tags: snooker, chrissmall, snookerscene.

Labels: snooker

As ever, the Friends' Meeting House in Manchester produces a classic quotation, this time from the Protestant pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is one of the figures Gordon Brown identifies in his new book about exceptionally courageous individuals.

Tags: bonhoeffer, dietrichbonhoeffer, brown, gordonbrown, book, courage

Labels: politics, theology

Perhaps hungover from yesterday, today I have been simmering with vitriol and confusion. I understand why we have the saying "blood boiling": that's how it feels. Your body temperature rises, your blood pressure increases, and that ultra-healthy pulse rate of 55 that I measured last week has gone completely out of the window. In moments like this I have a recurring involuntary image in my head: of driving my car (which I no longer have) as fast as I can into a brick wall. I'm beginning to wonder whether losing the car was a mistake. It might not have been safe for me to bez it round the M60 at 100mph every week, but it's likely that it is even more dangerous for me not to.

Tags: frustration, speed, anger.

Regular readers of this site will know that anti-racism is one of my hobby horses. I have previously expressed my frustration at being unable to tell some people in North Manchester General what I thought of their poisionous opinions, and remarked upon the contradictions of racist behaviour. I have also been flamed for encouraging people to leave constructive criticism on the racist blog posts of others.

So it was with trepidation today that I went on our choir meal — we were depleted in number, which was perhaps key to what ensued. Our priest (with whom I have a very good relationship) was away at another church, and a few of the other regulars were off sick. There is one particular person — not in my choir, I hasten to add, but always invited to the meals by association — who predictably, consistently, ends up sounding off about some tabloid matter, whether it be young people not respecting their elders, people having no sense of good behaviour on the roads, or, more usually, how Britain will soon become a minority white country. What is worst about this particular person is the volume and assurance with which he expounds his idiotic views — he clearly holds a conviction that his opinions are intellectual, empirically sound, and logically grounded, something he always attempts to demonstrate by the misuse of convoluted sentence structures and quasi-hifalutin vocabulary. All this has combined, over the five years I've known him, to give the impression of someone assured in their completely imagined authority.

When he started up today (due to the abovementioned reasons I was sat rather closer to him than usual, alas) I could feel the adrenalin start pumping; memories of that day in North Manchester General came flooding back, and I was filled immediately with pure rage. Having briefly attempted passive-aggressive gestures to demonstrate our antagonism, something snapped and I began (almost) shouting rebuttals at him, peppered, or rather riddled, with expletives whose offensiveness I deemed miniscule compared to the politely phrased indecency I had just witnessed. The content of my rebuttals was poor, but I had made a forceful gesture of opposition, which encouraged most of the other people at the table to rally around me, making more substantive contributions. To my delight, the two people he usually uses as "sympathetic" sounding boards — (they will tacitly agree with anything he says to them, because of an originary desire not to disagree with anyone, this then no doubt being interpreted by the offendant as real assent) — pointedly did not take his side, but rather spent the rest of the meal being particularly smiley with me. As a result, he did not speak again for thirty minutes, or perhaps almost an hour; something completely unheard of. It is possible that he hadn't realised how little respect he commands amongst the assembled company, in which case today will have been a genuine shock. And I'm sure he'll put it all down to me being young and not respecting my elders.

So was today a good or a bad day? It was certainly unusual. Most people at church have never heard me swear in five years (this is the first time I've really lost it at anyone, a record I'm proud of given my severe anger management issues, although I have regularly lost it with the photocopier), so I guess they will have been quite entertained by hearing me construct a minute-long sentence along the lines of "That's complete and utter fucking bollocks. I've never heard such a load of bullshit in fucking years. I'm not going to shitting sit here all afternoon to hear you spout more and more of this bollocks." Etc etc. I'm glad I said something this time, even if it was dramatic and probably not very constructive. At least he's in no doubt about where I and a number of other people stand now. But I know that it won't change his mind; if anything, he will only feel more justified in the ridiculous views he already holds. And I think this is problematic for our church.

If I'd had more time to fester and come up with good lines, I'd have said something intelligent like, "I don't understand how you can call yourself a Christian and then come here, a public place with fellow Christians, and talk like this. Jesus is supposed to have embodied the most radical social ethic there is, and here you are aligning yourself with the conservatives and bigots." And I forgot to say — this is someone who views himself as incredibly pious, always beating himself around the breast the loudest during the penitential bits of the mass. How can people live these absurd contradictions? His views are a problem for another reason: our parish and congregation is increasingly formed of African immigrants. How would they feel if they heard someone in the church talking like this, when the church may well be one of few places in the area where they feel welcomed? This is not just a matter of principle — it has the potential to do real damage. I really sympathise with liberals who dismiss Christianity because we have idiots like my friend amongst our number. Oh, and let's not forget former Archbishop George Carey's words on immigration last week.

I gradually calmed down but felt a bit bad for souring the atmosphere for everyone — even though most people I think enjoyed seeing someone stand up to the guy. Nevertheless, I consoled myself by going to the bar and downing a pint of John Smiths, before gazing vacantly at his wife's Bacardi Breezer bottles, observing that the labels had been ripped off, and hoping that all that stuff about sexual frustration was exactly right.

Tags: racism, church, manchester, love, immigration, meal, migration, george, georgecarey, archbishop, carey.

Labels: church, politics, racism

I'm sat inside with a streaming bout of what feels like hay fever. I've taken an overdose of antihistamines, doubled up on asthma medication, and been reduced to watching "How Clean Is Your House". Mindful that this is the last day that you're allowed to smoke in enclosed public places in England, I sit here wondering if it's happening for the right reasons.

For a start, let me say that I support the smoking ban, but the reasons being reported in the press are rather different from mine. For me, it is purely a libertarian question: how should the freedoms of smokers and non-smokers be balanced? For years people's freedom to smoke has trumped those who wish to be free of smoke, for reasons of preference, ill-health, or whatever. Consensus has gradually shifted (in the light of evidence of illnesses being caused by passive smoking, and also in the context of a reduced proportion of the population being smokers), and, from tomorrow, the liberties of non-smokers will trump those of smokers — although only in enclosed public places like pubs.

I believe the ban is right because I believe it is wrong for non-smokers to be disproportionately subjected to the harmful emissions of smokers in the light of the evidence. However, BBC News 24 claimed earlier that it is hoped the ban will cut the number of people taking up smoking, or choosing to continue to smoke. I do not agree with this reasoning, if it is indeed the reasoning that has been used to formulate this ban. No-one is unaware any more in this country of the dangers of smoking. If someone chooses to smoke, they must unequivocally have the right to make that decision without fear of stigmatisation in the name of "public health". This is the real corollary to the libertarian argument for the ban. Stories like this presume that everybody who smokes must regret it and want to give up. What about the smoker who smokes because s/he enjoys it, and has no desire to give up, happy to take a gamble on their health? Some of us would see the position as selfish or stupid, but I maintain that s/he must have the right to make that judgement for himself.

Here, the libertarian argument is right: protective of the individual, and life-affirming to boot. But an argument issuing from "national health" or the "public good" is really pernicious, and has the potential to become a source of tyranny. Any behaviour can be deemed offensive to a "public good" — traditionally, things like homosexuality and abortion (although I am personally opposed to the latter) — but a libertarian outlook on these matters is able to be more precise in its negotiation between individual and public. That this is happening is shown by our changing public attitudes to (junk) food: it is coming to be seen as wrong to eat badly and get fat, even though there is no libertarian issue whatsoever. People should be able to eat what they want, even if it makes them ill.

I really fear this trend. I used to smoke, but gave up. I'm trying to improve my own diet. I've scrapped the car and now cycle everywhere. I seem to be drinking less. But sometimes I wonder, why am I doing all this? Would it not be better to take my chances and have fun? I'm no happier as a result of these moves, even if I do feel a little more virtuous. There's no point doing these things to extend your life or improve your health, because the chances are you'll get run over by a bus before you see the results. However "bad" a habit, I enjoyed smoking, and I think we underestimate how important a consideration that is. Our fuzzy thinking here is shown by Richard Peto, quoted in this BBC report:

Half of all smokers are going to be killed by tobacco. If a million people stop smoking who wouldn't otherwise have done so then maybe you'll prevent half a million deaths.

This would be strikingly persuasive were it not so absurdly wrong. Those deaths will still occur; we are not immortal. People take informed risks with their health all the time, and it is not up to "us" to force decisions on people. As he so often did, George Orwell got it right. His character George Bowling muses in Coming up for Air:

I remembered a bit I'd read in the paper somewhere about these food-factories in Germany where everything's made out of something else. Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that they were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I'd bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That's the way we're going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees.

[...]

When I came out of the pub I felt quite different.

I'd had a couple of pints, they'd warmed me up inside, and the cigar smoke oozing round my new teeth gave me a fresh, clean, peaceful sort of feeling. All of a sudden I felt kind of thoughtful and philosophic. It was partly because I didn't have any work to do. My mind went back to the thoughts of war I'd been having earlier that morning, when the bomber flew over the train. I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.

Tags: smoking, ban, libertarianism, libertarian, smokingban, england, paternalism, orwell, georgeorwell, comingupforair.